The other day I ran into a laptop where the desktop looks like the following screenshot.

Click on the picture to view the full resolution for the image. The text is too small and as you can see there are 3 rows of icons in the system tray! The system tray is the default size and it can fit 3 rows of icons when it can normally only have 1. Tried clicking on “Advanced” button in the “Display Properties” Tab (shown below) and a DLL crashed.

Tried Changing things in the “Advanced Appearance” dialog and managed to make things more usable but it did not solve the problem.

Then it dawned on me that it may be the DPI settings, which can only be accessed when clicking the “Advanced” button to get the graphics card advanced dialog box. But since it crashed I had to get an alternative fix

After some Googling I found this and modified the registry as follows:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontDPI]
"LogPixels"=dword:00000060

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts]
"Courier 10,12,15 (VGA res)"="COURE.FON"
"MS Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24 (VGA res)"="SERIFE.FON"
"MS Sans Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24 (VGA res)"="SSERIFE.FON"
"Small Fonts (VGA res)"="SMALLE.FON"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\GRE_Initialize]
"FIXEDFON.FON"="vgafix.fon"
"FONTS.FON"="vgasys.fon"
"OEMFONT.FON"="vgaoem.fon"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles001\Software\Fonts]
"FIXEDFON.FON"="vgafix.fon"
"FONTS.FON"="vgasys.fon"
"OEMFONT.FON"="vgaoem.fon"
"LogPixels"=dword:00000060

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\Current\Software\Fonts]
"FIXEDFON.FON"="vgafix.fon"
"FONTS.FON"="vgasys.fon"
"OEMFONT.FON"="vgaoem.fon"
"LogPixels"=dword:00000060


Rebooted and viola! Back to business as per normal